Friday Update: The Reading Queue (10th April)

In Jill Johnson’s new novel, Professor Eustacia Rose is done with murder – it’s time to settle down with the love of her life, Matilde.

For anybody new to this series, which began with Devil’s Breath, Professor Eustacia Rose is the Head of Botanical Toxicology at University College. An expert in rare and highly poisonous plants, she’s brilliant, neurodivergent, gay, and a very complicated person to be around. Luckily, her partner, Matilde, is patience personified, even if she is a little bit obsessed with home decorating – something that’s destined to discomfort Rose to the point of explosion, unless her failure to grasp the central premise of ‘done with murder’ drives Matilde back to Spain permanently first.

But I am not most people. I am Professor Eustacia Amelia Rose, Head of Botanical Toxicology at University College London. And I had chosen to walk through the arched entrance, and across the reception to the glassed-off area. I wasn’t here to make a complaint, or to report a crime, and I certainly wasn’t here to hand myself in. I was here because I’d received a phone call from Detective Chief Inspector Roberts not fifteen minutes before and it was imperative I find out why.

However, DCI Roberts – and others – seem to be more interested in finding a reason why they shouldn’t look into the death of a man from a plant toxin called gamma-coniceine. Despite his superiors’ tendency to regard Roberts and Rose as experts in the field of plant toxin murders, and Roberts’ reluctance, all hesitation is lost when Rose identifies the source of the poison as hemlock – one of the dangerous plants previously stolen from her rooftop garden – and the victim as somebody she’s recently been in very close contact with:

The man stepped out into the passageway. He was wearing a leather apron, the bulging pockets of which I assumed contained gardening gloves, secateurs, twine.

This series is currently made up of three novels: Devil’s Breath, Hell’s Bells, and Bella Donna, with a fourth, Blood Root,due for release in June 2026. It’s also a series that would definitely benefit from reading in order. Professor Rose is a complex woman with simple tastes and an incredibly complicated background. Raised mostly by her single father, whom she worshipped, she still wears his tweed suits and watch, and lives in the apartment they shared.

In the earlier novels she cared for a highly illegal and very dangerous rooftop garden full of illicitly obtained toxic plants, while also performing her role as Head of Botanical Toxicology. Her mother has also returned to her life after abandoning the family when Rose was very young, a relationship as fraught as you’d imagine after all these years. Roses’ neurodivergence manifests as extreme intelligence and laser-like focus on the things that interest her, but little ability, or desire, to interact with others – until things she started to see from her rooftop garden tempted her out into the world, and into the path of murderers with unique ways of killing. Many of these traits appear to circle back to her relationship with her father, and the world he built for his much loved daughter.

I lifted my eyes to the sky as a wave of shame rushed through me. I’d suffered panic attacks since childhood and only Father knew how to calm my racing heart, slow my rapid breathing, soothe away the panic. Only he knew that taking me for walks through the Oxford countryside, pointing out the different plants, teaching me their common and Latin names, patiently telling me about their properties, their toxicities, their folklore, would, as he’d called it, restore equilibrium. But Father was dead.

Her collection of rare plants was stolen as a result of one of the cases she was helping the police to investigate, and the latter novels have included the search to recover individual specimens, some of which appear to have fallen into the hands of organised crime gangs. It’s this background that readers may feel more comfortable understanding, as the links between Rose and the activities she walks straight into all come back to her single-minded determination to recover her beloved plants while not annoying her beloved Matilde – although that bit of human interaction is much much harder for her to deal with. To say nothing of how Rose deals with a new character on the scene – the exotic Zsa Zsa

Matilde let out a soft hum.

‘Should I be jealous?’

‘Of what?’

‘Of you finding a pretty plant for Zsa Zsa.’

I let out a guffaw.

‘That won’t happen.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because she isn’t pretty.’

On the contrary, Zsa Zsa is a very attractive and, it turns out, ruthless woman who is on the same trail as Rose, trying to recover some particularly dangerous plants. Meanwhile Rose and Matilde are navigating the complications of a relationship where one partner is trying hard to fit in with another determined to live their own version of a normal life. Meanwhile DCI Roberts is mostly trying to stay alive, and to stay out of the path of Professor Rose, who he admires and is driven insane by in equal measure.

The balance of Bella Donna is skewed slightly towards the personal relationships, with a number of threads from earlier novels being knitted into this story of organised crime and toxic plant murder. The initial victim, an intermediary that Rose had been in contact with before his death, has died very mysteriously, with no obvious ingestion of the poison that killed him. Subsequent murders have a more obvious cause, but the connections are vague, and the involvement of the gangs across multiple countries insidious and hard to unravel.

Nearly as hard to unravel, it turns out, as love and life. Something Professor Rose is continuing to struggle with, even as she proves herself again to be an intuitive solver of crimes.

In Tom Baragwanath’s latest crime novel, Lorraine Henry knows only too well how small towns and close communities are a blessing and a curse.

Tom Baragwanath first introduced ‘Lo’ Henry in Paper Cage, a novel about a small but divided community and a string of missing children. In his latest release, Lucky Thing, Lo is back in a story again concentrating on the dangers that can impact younger people – this time teenagers dealing with petty jealousies, bullying, and partying, and the perils of attraction and social stigma. In a small town it’s easy to assume that because everyone knows who or what they are dealing with, kids should be safe.

A place like Masterton, it’s easy to slot someone away, categorised and neat. Trouble, or no trouble at all. Worth keeping an eye on, or not worth the worry.

While it’s definitely not necessary to have read the first book, Lo is an engaging character, and Paper Cage will give the reader a more complete understanding of how she fits into this place. Masterton is a small town in New Zealand, and Lo works as the files clerk for the local police, although her job has been getting more varied.

Mine has been quite the fluid job description lately. Fetching the biscuits for the staffroom, piecing together Dion’s spidery pages of notes into something the prosecutor’s office can read, covering the Chief’s updates to Head Office while he’s at Bunnings. Light child-recovery duties. And now, apparently, calls to next of kin.

Lo’s also in a unique position in the community. A Pākehā married into a Māori family, she is an insider and outsider in both communities. With no children of her own and her husband now dead after a workplace accident, she’s close to niece Sheena and Sheena’s young son Bradley. She’s used to dealing with young kids, recalcitrant teenagers, and tricky parents – she’s a sounding board for many in the community and the sort of woman who sees, hears, and figures out a lot.

Inside these wet eyes, a flash of colour passes in a brief moment of electricity. I’ve done this enough with Sheena, with Bradley. Shaking the brush and waiting for the bird.

The impending birth of Sheena’s new baby is the main thing on Lo’s mind until a young girl is found beaten and dumped in the cold bush. Jessica Mowbrie is lucky to be alive. But the next person isn’t so lucky, and the discovery of a body really stretches a police unit that’s under-resourced and physically isolated. Their commitment to finding who battered Jessica is unwavering, but the death means competing priorities take a lot of managing. For a force made up of boss Rick Ambrose, beat cop Dion, and a file clerk, it was already a big ask. Take Rick out of the picture due to a violent moment, and the stakes get higher.

The angle of the fall is all wrong, Rick’s arms pinned high and useless, his heavy torso coming down like a load of logs giving way. I move forward to reach him, but it isn’t enough; he hits the pavement, and his head strikes the sharpest edge of the camera.

The key to understanding why Jessica was battered, and the particularly chilling murder, comes down to the connections between people, the locations of events, and a lot of local knowledge. As with all small places, there are the monied few – landed gentry types, mostly white Pākehā families whose kids go to private schools, own a lot of land, and have a tendency to lord it over everyone. An attitude that is mirrored in the teenage community, with girls like Jessica and her cousin from working-class families trying to find a way to fit in with the ‘it’ crowd. As is often the case, the ‘it’ crowd are a bunch of bullies who are in too deep themselves. Not surprisingly, it’s Lo who hears a rumour that might explain some of the tension.

‘See what he knows about the debating club.’ I nod. ‘Apparently some of the Aquinas girls weren’t too keen on having Jessica there. He might have heard something.’

Baragwanath takes a deep dive into the nature of insider and outsider communities in Lucky Thing. Lo has always straddled the two worlds of Pākehā and Māori, landed gentry and working families. He expands that out with Jessica and her cousin, and the two young boys deeply involved in the story, Tāmati and Stu, all dealing with teenage angst against a background of those who have and those who have not so much. Then he takes that scenario right into a family who appears to have everything, and the past events that say a lot about who they are and what they stand for.

Maybe that’s the point of Lucky Thing – those who have everything may not be the luckiest people, because so much tangible ‘stuff’ was acquired by force or manipulation, and subsequent generations have struggled to hang onto it. Perhaps the lucky ones are those with a sense of community, family and connection. Not so tangible, not so easy to lose because of a momentary bad decision.